So you fancy yourself a pretty good cliff-jumper. You always personally inspect your landing spot for hazards and the necessary depth. Good. But here's the thing, how do you know how much depth you need unless you know exactly how high you're jumping from? With NASA smarts, that's how.

To many of us, the government shutdown is inexplicable: a crazy situation, brought about a minority faction over a bill that's already been passed into law. But for math professor Peter Turchin, it was entirely predicable.

Scientists love developing equations that can accurately predict real-life events—so when researchers from Stanford looked at Reddit, they naturally wondered if they could predict how successful posts would be. This equation is the result of their work.

When the global financial markets began to collapse in 2007, everybody turned on the banks and bankers — and they haven't stopped since. But one of the culprits was a humble piece of mathematics: the Black-Scholes equation.